Pejvak
© Pejvak
Pejvak (meaning ‘echo’ in Farsi) is a research-driven collaborative practice between artists Felix Kalmenson and Rouzbeh Akhbari, who develop projects exploring historically resonant situations where ideologies, geopolitics, fiction and infrastructure collide. Shokouk — A Cosmicomedy in Four Acts interweaves historical facts with fiction in a circular narrative structure. In the opening act, we see spectators filling a stand to watch a rocket launch together. The seemingly banal gossip of the crowd actually follows a written score, based on field research in the region around the Ulytau region, Kazakhstan, in the fall zones of the rockets. Here, the Baikonur Cosmodrome — the largest rocket launch site in the world and one of the former-Soviet Union’s most expensive infrastructure projects — causes physical and ecological damage by releasing toxic substances into the wider region. Next, we meet a historical figure speculated on by a Soviet journalist, Nikifor Nikitin, a labourer who was supposedly exiled to Baikonur in 1848 for inciting the people to flee the rule of Tsar Nicholas I by flying to the moon. In the third act, we end up at a Karaoke duet sung between Omar Khayam and Nasirdin AlTusi, astronomers from the 12th and 13th centuries, hosted by the fictional Chinese infrastructure company Skybridge Unlimited. Their lyrics in fact discussing the variable luminosity of Polaris. Finally, we board the MIR space station, where cos - monaut Sergei Krikalev who was stranded in space for 313 days following the collapse of the Soviet Union — providing him with the moniker “The Last Soviet” — and whose mission was launched from… the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Shokouk is a phantasmagoric journey circumnavigating dreams, delusions and seismic events.
Shokouk — A Cosmicomedy in Four Acts was the second project by Pejvak produced as part of their M HKA / Van Abbemuseum Research Fellowship in 2021–22.
Shokouk: A Cosmicomedy in Four Acts, 2022
Single-channel video, 16:28 min. A3 Poster, custom-made seat liner cosmonaut chair (transport MIR space station)
Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven